WWI, was No-Man's Land

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 10:31 AM

A worthwhile & noble cause and war...???

... so which individuals, armaments manufacturers, ancillary product suppliers, etc, and Nations
profiteered most from sustaining WW1 for so many long tragic years...???

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Musket
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 09:56 AM

I don't confuse. It was context. That said, there is more symmetry between MOD and top brass military than DoH and NHS. Trust me.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 09:31 AM

Keith, in case nobody ever told you, I'll do you a favour: you're about as arrogant a git as I've ever come across, and I work with historians. You're so far up your own arse you think you can see sunlight, because you're cleaning your teeth from the tonsils end.
Your problem is probably that you get your history from the crap end of the daytime TV channels, which specialise in the "historic" study of the socialist policies of the National Socialist Party of Germany, focusing on the performance of the Messerschmidt 109, and their brethren in the gutter press, After The Battle and its descendants, whatever it is now.

Musket, be careful not to confuse the MOD and fighting forces. The teeth end have as little as feasibly possible to do with the MOD, because the latter are a bunch of time-serving civvies whose service is something associated with the form used in the CofE: all faith and only by a miracle does anything actually result. You could fire the lot and the delivery of the Military would shoot up.
Whether it is anything to do with the reality that they're mostly distributed in places like Llangennech and Runcorn, which make Little Britain look like a documentary, and recruit locally, I leave up to you.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Raggytash
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 09:14 AM

Keith could you let me have names of historians you have read or even better the books concerned.

Ta

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Musket
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 08:48 AM

Point of order. You can't call older views revisionist vis a vis new views.

Funny how they all got their donkeys barbecued on the road to Damascus about the same time the establishment wanted history sanitising in order to make the armed forces look better than they are. Too many dead soldiers in recent conflicts. Can't have poor leadership questioned now they can be sued by widows for not leading and protecting their men eh?

(Just in case anyone wondered what all the recent sanitising of incompetence is all about.

As someone once charged with looking at efficiency in The NHS, the criminal waste and corruption of The MOD is something I take more than a passing interest in.)

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 08:13 AM

I am fully aware that a previous generation of Historians held those revisionist views.
I Have always had an interest in those events and back in the 60s and 70s accepted those views myself.
All the current historians I have come across reject those views.
I have found no dissenters and neither has anyone else.
I am not so arrogant as to believe that my opinion is worth more than the historians'.
I merely point out that Musket's views are not supported by current historians.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Musket
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 08:04 AM

Gosh, maybe I'm not a liar after all?

Who'd have thought it...

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST,Raggytash
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 06:56 AM

The Guest at 5.59 was me

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 06:45 AM

Checking back, has Keith ever posted anything about real music? I've just checked his profile for the last couple of months, and he's not posted a thing other than being argumentative, which suggests he's fallen prey to self-aggrandisement, at least. Which is a subtle way of saying, get a life, man.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 06:11 AM

Keith
If posting Military "Battle" Police immediately behind the front line checking the trenches for anyone who didn't go "over the top", driving them over if necessary, and subesquently executing anyone who escaped them for cowardice, regardless of any other considerations, whith only a death from enemy machine guns as the likely outcome in front, is not callous disregard for human life, then I don't know what is.
Mind you, the fact you can trot out that argument shows you share the same fault. Callous disregard for human life.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 05:59 AM

Keith,

The ringing endorsements you suggest have been made of the British leadership include the following.

Churchill's judgement on Haig was he "wore down alike the manhood and the guns of the British Army almost to destruction"

The Military Historian Sir John Keegan wrote "On the Somme, (Haig)had sent the flower of British Youth to death or mutilation, at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond"

JFC Fuller wrote of Passchendaele "to persist ... in this tactically impossible battle was an inexcusable piece of pigheadness on the part of Haig"

The historian B H Liddell Hart (himself a veteran) wrote "He (Haig) was a man of extreme egoism and utter lack of scruple, who, to his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the government he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal"

Praise indeed.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 05:35 AM

Are we posting in duplicate now?

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 04:57 AM

There was no callous disregard for human life.
On the question of the leadership of the army, historians have reached a different conclusion to yours Musket.
Perhaps you are aware of something that they have all missed.
I just think you are incapable of seeing beyond your prejudice and ignorance.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 02:24 AM

I don't disagree with any of that. I simply don't understand how such considerations in any way "damn the dead". They don't seem to me to imply any lack of respect or compassion for those who died. Could you elucidate what exactly you meant by that particular phrase, please?

≈M≈

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: Musket
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 02:03 AM

For me, your post above misses the point. You speak of politics of the day and you speak of views about the war and justification of it. Those two aspects rely on how people thought back then.

What you are not factoring into your post is the callous disregard for human life that fuelled said politics and goals. You don't seem to be taking on board the well documented incompetence and poor leadership, or the jingoism and propaganda used to lure young men to their death, or indeed their lives from that point onwards being so so different.

That's what is so wrong about the armchair wannabe fools who keep cropping up to defend the awful sanitising of war who wish to rewrite history to make it look as if the gung ho top brass knew what they were doing. The biggest stain the revisionist lot have inflicted is make Blackadder possibly the nearest we have to the attitudes of the day. When a comic parody described attitudes better than the Michael Gove team of historians, something somewhere stinks.

Subject: RE: No man's land protest
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 16 Nov 14 - 01:18 AM

In what way does difference over political motivations a century ago 'damn the dead'? One can respect their memory without having to agree with all those who denounce the very fact of the war's having occurred. NB that this is not a statement of justification for the war itself, merely for the right to discuss the limited aspects of the topic which this thread addresses.

In which connection, I have no idea of what Troubadour's question to me a few posts above implies? I put a non-rhetorical question, and did not suggest any answer. How does my doing my so suggest that I think that moral principles should be shelved while its implications are considered?

≈M≈